Written by: Alan Parker, ISO 27001 Consultant

Getting a qualification around ISO 27001 is genuinely worthwhile. It is good for your career, good for your credibility, and (most importantly) good for actually doing the job properly.

Whether you pursue an ISO 27001 qualification will ultimately come down to what you can afford, how much time you have available, and, to be honest, how much you enjoy formal study. Not everyone does, and that’s a fair thing to acknowledge.

But whatever you decide about formal qualifications, there is one thing I’d say before we get into the options.

Start Here: Read the Standard!

I meet people working with ISO 27001 from all over the world, and the variation in how well they actually understand it is striking. More often than you would expect, I encounter people who have been implementing or managing an ISMS for a period and who have never sat down with a copy of the actual standard and properly read it. It’s not like it takes very long either.

You can usually spot them. They’ll nod confidently when you talk about risk management and continuous improvement, but when they go away and put it into practice, what emerges is a kind of bastardised version of ISO 27001. I’ve seen nonconformities confused with incidents. I’ve seen Statements of Applicability that bear little relation to the organisation’s actual risk posture. It happens more than it should, and it is often entirely avoidable.

So before you spend a penny on training, get a copy of ISO 27001:2022 from ISO.org and read it cover to cover. The actual requirements, Clauses 4 through 10, are not long. You can read them in a focused hour. Everything else; the courses, the guides, the toolkits, should be layered on top of that understanding, not used as a substitute for it.

The Gold Standard: BSI Training Courses

When it comes to formal ISO 27001 training, I point people towards BSI — the British Standards Institution. That’s not a throwaway recommendation. BSI originally developed BS 7799, the standard that became ISO 27001, and they continue to work closely with ISO on its development and maintenance. They set the bar, and frankly in audits, set it quite high.

If you are going to invest in formal training, training with the organisation that built the standard makes sense.

BSI offers three core ISO 27001 training courses (which are also offered by many other organisations). Which one is right for you depends on your role and what you are trying to achieve.

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Lead Implementer

This is the course I would recommend for anyone who is responsible for building, managing, or improving an ISMS.

It is a five-day intensive programme that covers gap assessments, implementation planning, and the practical techniques for managing an ISMS properly.

If you have been running an ISMS for some time largely from memory, or based on what a consultant set up for you, this course is probably the most valuable thing you could do. The structure and rigour of formalising your knowledge at this level will change how you approach the work, and gives you a credential to back it up.

BSI Lead Implementer → bsigroup.com

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Internal Auditor

If you are responsible for running your organisation’s internal audit programme, this is the course to look at. ISO 27001 is explicit that internal auditors must be both impartial and competent. The Internal Auditor course gives you the formal competence credential to support what you may already be doing in practice.

BSI recommend completing a requirements course beforehand if you do not already have a solid grounding in the standard, which brings us back to reading it first.

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Lead Auditor

The Lead Auditor course is primarily aimed at people looking to move into consultancy or external audit roles. But I would also recommend it for anyone in a larger or more complex organisation who wants to understand how audits actually work from the inside.

There is a real practical value in understanding how auditors are trained – what they look for, how they sample evidence, how they distinguish a nonconformity from an observation. If you know that, you are in a much stronger position when your own certification audit comes around. Peeking over the fence, in this case, is entirely worthwhile.

For Limited Time or Budget: The DIY Route

BSI training is excellent, but it is not cheap, and a five-day residential course requires a meaningful block of time away from the day job. Not everyone has that, and for smaller organisations especially, it can be a difficult case to make.

For people in small-to-medium businesses who want to both understand ISO 27001 and learn how to implement it, I offer my own online course at iseoblue.com. It is designed to be worked through at your own pace, in a way that is directly applicable to your organisation. You receive a certificate of completion at the end.

Iseo Blue ISO 27001 Course → iseoblue.com/iso-27001/iso-27001-course/

I won’t pretend to have reviewed every other online ISO 27001 course on the market, because I haven’t, and I don’t think it would be fair to comment on what I haven’t properly evaluated.

The market is variable in quality (isn’t it always). What I’d say, regardless of which route you take: make sure any course covers the 2022 version of the standard, and always come back to the actual text.

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For Senior Managers: CISMP

Not everyone needs to go deep on ISO 27001 specifically. If you are a manager or executive who needs to understand information security governance, make informed decisions about risk, and have credible conversations with your ISMS team or certification auditors — but without becoming an ISMS specialist — then the BCS Certificate in Information Security Management Principles (CISMP) is worth considering.

I hold this qualification. It covers information security governance, risk management frameworks, and the principles of managing information security across an organisation. A lot of it overlaps with ISO 27001 in spirit, but it is broader and less prescriptive. It is a good fit for someone whose role is one of strategic oversight rather than hands-on implementation.

🎯 Who it’s for: CISMP is a good choice if you sit above the ISMS in your organisation’s structure, or if you want a recognised qualification in information security governance without the depth of a lead implementer programme.

I took my CISMP a few years ago now, with IT Governance (now GRC Solutions), but they were good, and it launched my career into Information Security, so they are a recommended starting point. Review their training solutions here.

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Which Qualification Is Right for You?

The tool below can help you determine which path makes the most sense for your role and goals. Use it as a starting point; not every situation maps neatly to a single answer, and if you’re unsure, feel free to get in touch with me: alan.parker@iseoblue.com.

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The Most Valuable Thing

I’ll end with something no qualification gives you, but that is arguably more useful than all of them combined.

Know the wording of ISO 27001 like the back of your hand.

I’ve been in audits where the auditor cited requirements that simply do not exist in ISO 27001 — requirements from ISO 9001, or from their own interpretation of best practice, or from nowhere in particular. If you do not know the standard well enough to recognise that, you can find yourself agreeing to nonconformities that are not nonconformities, or making changes to your ISMS that the standard never asked for.

The question “where does it say that in the standard?” is possibly the single most powerful thing you can ask in an audit. But you can only ask it with confidence if you already know the answer.

Qualifications matter. Training matters. But they are a supplement to understanding the standard, not a replacement for it.

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Frequently Asked Questions: ISO 27001 Certification for Individuals